Nvidia Moves From Gamers to Gunners With Intelligence, Defense Apps

NVidia's GPUs are well-known for making consumer software run faster, whether you're talking about games, Photoshop or SETI at Home. But now the company is providing processors with supercomputer-like qualities to solve much tougher problems.

I
was sitting with two executives from Nvidia in the Truman Lounge of the National Press Club. On the screen in front
of me was an almost unrecognizable view of a terrorist speedboat taken from the
helmet-mounted camera of a Marine in a helicopter. Even the best-trained
observer would be hard-pressed to count the four people in the boat. It was
impossible to determine the origin of the craft or identify the weapons on the
deck of the boat.
Then
with the click of a mouse, the video became a solid, stable, high-definition
view in which you could see every detail. Next, was a distant shot covering a
vast field across which two people were walking slowly. A movement sensing
package was supposed to be highlighting the figures and alerting the person
monitoring the view.

But
as is the case with surveillance cameras, you had to be watching closely to see
the people at all. The movement sensing software was designed to detect the
people in the image and alert the operator. But by the time it finally noticed,
the people had moved almost fully across the screen. A change in the software
and the figures were highlighted almost instantly.

The
Nvidia people were showing me the results of improvements in imaging now in use
by the military and the intelligence establishment, but rarely seen by the
public. What the company has done is take its
GPUs (graphics processing units) and turned them into massively parallel
processors. While these processors have been available as specialized
workstations and servers, now they're being mounted in helmet cameras, remotely
controlled drones, surveillance equipment and simulators. Effectively, Nvidia
has taken the
core of a supercomputer and put it into the field.
The
technology behind all of this is built into Nvidia's
Tesla M2090 GPU Computing Modules, which are already being used in a
variety of applications. The difference is that now the Tesla modules are being
put into helmets and Humvees, drones, manned aircraft and other things the
intelligence community really doesn't want us to know about. The result has
been a remarkable transformation in remote imaging and remote sensing.
As
the Nvidia folks described it to me, the biggest difference is that the initial
processing takes place before the devices' sensors try to transmit the
information back to wherever it's going.

Wayne Rash is a Senior Analyst for eWEEK Labs and runs the magazine's Washington Bureau. Prior to joining eWEEK as a Senior Writer on wireless technology, he was a Senior Contributing Editor and previously a Senior Analyst in the InfoWorld Test Center. He was also a reviewer for Federal Computer Week and Information Security Magazine. Previously, he ran the reviews and events departments at CMP's InternetWeek.

He is a retired naval officer, a former principal at American Management Systems and a long-time columnist for Byte Magazine. He is a regular contributor to Plane & Pilot Magazine and The Washington Post.